“I’d never bloody lived at all till she came along and changed everything.” Pure pulp deliciousness. This is the novel John Travolta reads on the toilet when Bruce Willis finds and shoots him in “Pulp Fiction”, a Hollywood nod to a character born in those three panel strips in the Standard I could never quite get into. This first Modesty Blaise novel is huge fun, though; like you’ve suddenly come across an undiscovered tranche of Bond novels. Miss Blaise absolutely kicks ass throughout this, busting her partner in crime out of a middle European prison, getting hired by the British Government during a performance of Swan Lake and setting out to foil a diamond heist. Very satisfyingly, it’s a complete bloodbath – this is no campy romp – with friends and enemies dropping like flies. While all the men in the novel think Modesty is just fab, her enemies are genuine murderous hoods and her sidekick Willie Garvin is not some blundering comic relief but a professional himself targetted for lifting by the enemy. This may not top Fleming but it is way better than the majority of Bond continuation novels. No wonder Modesty Blaise continues to be the template for every “female spy” doing the rounds in pop culture. Compare her look on the cover of the novel to that of Scarlet Johannson’s ‘Black Widow’ or Uma Thurman’s ‘Emma Peel’. Rebecca Ferguson is 99% Modesty Blaise in “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation”. Not bad for a novel written in 1965.
